Chiggers, Ticks, and Frozen Shoes

In the Ozarks, Spring is a wonderful time. Leaves on trees turn again to green. Myriad flowers bloom in glorious colors. Blooms on vines and bushes give way to fruit - wild blackberries, wild strawberries, wild blueberries, grapes. Grasses begin to grow.


As early Spring turns to late Spring and then to early summer, all kinds of critters come out to play.


Among those are chiggers and ticks. Chiggers and ticks. Ticks and chiggers.


Chiggers - microscopic bugs, too small for the human eye to see unaided. You are out in the woods enjoying nature, hiking in the woods, enraptured by the sights, the colors, the fresh smells of flowers in bloom.


You return home from your nature hike, having enjoyed it so very much.


The next day, you experience a horrible itching on your ankles, your legs, behind your knees, and around your waist. Red welts rise in those places. Time to get out the summer medicines.


Chiggers, nasty creatures that they are, don't really bite. After you picked up the unseen hitchhikers, they crawl around your body, looking for a place to settle down for a feast. They begin to feed if they reach a barrier, such as the top of your socks, the waistband of your clothes or your armpit.


They attach themselves to your skin, inject saliva with digestive enzymes that helps to break down your skin cells, which the chigger drinks. These enzymes cause the itchy rash.


That is why it is good to use a repellent, like DEET, although that does not work 100%. That is why is is good to shower or bathe, thoroughly, scrubbing twice, after you have been out in nature.



Ticks - not so microscopic arachnid, yes, related to the spider. Unlike chiggers, which run to you, ticks wait for you to come to them, often at the top of tall grass or weeds. You can actually see them if you look closely when walking in the woods, as they wave their arms, as if to say, "Come to me!"


Around here, we have the lone-star tick, a hard tick. The females are distinguishable by the white dot or "star" on its back. The males can also have dots or white streaks on the edge of their bodies.


Either before or after bathing to rid yourself of chiggers after a day in nature, you need to check for ticks - everywhere, even the nooks and crannies on your body. The only way to remove them is with tweezers. Any other method can leave their mouth still on your body and can lead to infection. In addition, ticks, from the beginning of their life cycle to the end, feed on various creatures and humans. They can carry diseases from the animals to you, injecting them into your bloodstream.


What do you do with the ticks after removing them? We keep a "tick jar" in the kitchen. It is filled with rubbing alcohol, and we simply drop them in the jar where they die a horrible death after a brief struggle!

In addtion, when we come in from outdoors, we place our shoes in plastic kitchen trash bags and stick them in the freezer overnight. This kill the chiggers that may still be on the shoes.


It is so easy to bring the ticks and chiggers into the house with you. Which is why we have another plastic kitchen trash bag to drop out clothing into. Later the clothing will be washed in very hot water.


Still, by the time late fall and early winter roll around, the rashes and bites have healed, the annoying itching is gone, and all we remember, until next summer, are the joys of experiencing the beauty of nature.

Tornadoes

I just realized I mentioned an April tornado in the last post, but have never posted the story.

The story begins Wednesday, April 9, 2008.

It started out with almost continuous lightning and raucous thunder. The sky was lit up with the lightning almost as bright as sunlight. The thunder, lightning, and rain continued almost non-stop. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a bright flash of lightning, a loud thunderclap, and what souned like a tree being hit by lightning. I did not have my rain guage out, so I had no idea how much rain we got overnight. It sure sounded like plenty. We lost power sometime during the night.

The power came on again around 2am Thursday. It was still on when we woke up at 6am.

Around 6:30am, Colleen was sitting in the living room putting her shoes on. Suddenly things got very, very dark, windy, and torrential rains come down. The power went out immediately. I was sure it was a tornado (we were under a tornado watch). The wind was beating relentlessly against the windows. It frightened us so much, we ran to the bathroom and hid there until it passed.

When we finally came out of the bathroom, we saw part of a pine tree lying next to the dining room window. It was continuing to rain, though nowhere as heavily as it had just been. We took a short walk outside to see what had happened. We saw that the pine tree had fallen in such a way that the outer top branches just brushed the dining room roof.

When the rain stopped and the sun came out, we started walking around our property to check out what happened. We saw six or seven more pine trees which had fallen behind our garden shed. Most of them fell against another large oak tree. One tree fell into a cedar tree just behind the garden shed and thus the shed was spared any damage. The front yard was littered with pine branches.

We then walked down the driveway that goes out the northernmost part of our property. We saw even more pine trees, and some oaks, that had fallen over from the roots, had snapped down near the bottom, or had been twisted off the trunk a few feet from the ground. During that walk we saw the remains of a pine tree which had been struck by lightning, charred from the top to the bottom, with a barber-pole like stripe down the tree where bark had come off when the lightning struck.

All in all, we counted two-dozen (at least) trees that had gone down during the storm. They were in such a straight-line pattern, it sure seemed like it was from a tornado.

Then we walked down to the "gentle" creek that flows across the road a little further north of our property. This creek, usually a few feet wide and either very dry or with a gentle flow, was now at least ten feet across with the water rushing in a mad torrent. That made me think we must have received several inches of water since the storm had started just a few hours earlier.

We also saw another pine tree which had fallen from our property across the dirt road at the east of our property effectively blocking any exit to civilization. There is another creek to the southeast of us that we found out was so bad that even the trucks from the electric company would not cross. Trees were down all up and down the road. In one spot the road was covered with water where there is not even a creek.

Later that afternoon, I discovered the pine tree that fell outside our dining room was not one but TWO pine trees.

Oh, yes, the electric company. The storm had snapped four power poles in half and it took them most of the day to replace them and get power back. The power came back at 8pm. It was the next day before we had telephone service.

This was more excitement than we could stand and we were exhausted.

How much wood?

For the past two days, we've had a new visitor in our yard. This little guy is know variously as Woodchuck, Groundhog, Marmot, and Whistling Pig. This one is probably at the upper limit in total length - around two feet. The first day, we spied him crawling under the car. Today, he was outside the dining room, under and around the pine tree downed by the April tornado.


With all the trees downed, both by the April tornado and those we had cut down both before and after the tornado, it would be nice if they really chucked wood. Unfortunately, it appears this creature mainly eats grass and clover. But we have plenty of clover (the second picture was captured while he was eating the clover outside the dining room window).

The name woodchuck has nothing to do with wood or chucking. It comes from the Algonquian name for the animal, "wuchak".

The woodchuck is a burrowing animal. Given the concrete hardness of the ground here and how rocky it is, I wonder how this one dug any burrows.

From what I've read, they can move around 35 cubic feet of dirt when digging a burrow. With two to five entrances, the woodchuck's burrow can have 45 feet of tunnels.


One of the reasons it is called a whistling pig is that, when alarmed, a woodchuck will use a high-pitched whistle to alert the colony.

A Silver Spoon

We just finished doing something that, a year ago, we never thought we would do.


When Colleen decided last spring that she wanted to buy some bees and equipment and start beekeeping, I thought it was an interesting idea, but not for me. She did all the work on the hives last year until it came time to extract the honey. Then I helped. The results were delicious - all fourteen pounds of it.


So this year, I decided to join in the fun and, aided by Colleen, I installed the second hive. I found it to be an eye-opening hobby.


It is amazing how docile they can be. You open up the hive to check them out (after smoking them with a smoker). You can then pick up the frames and turn them around and upside down and the bees keep working away as if nothing is happening. Of course, the bee suit and veil give you more confidence when working around bees.


It is also interesting to watch them during the day when they are so busy. It is like a madhouse. Bees are coming in from their foraging, and waiting in line to get inside to make their deposits, while others are going around in circles, ever higher, then flying off over the tops of trees to go out and gather more nectar, pollen, and water.


We were out most of the day today, and got back home early afternoon. After getting out of the car, we heard a loud buzzing sound. We tracked it down to a huge pine tree at the edge of the wooded area of our property out front. There was a huge swarm of bees just settling down on a branch.







At first, we were afraid that our bees had swarmed. We were trying to figure out how to get them off the branch, twenty-five feet up, and into an extra hive body we had. A swarm is what happens when a group of bees is led by a queen from their hive to start their own hive.


The book "First Lessons in Beekeeping" describes it thusly "Groups of workers begin a frenzied wave of running action around and around the interior of the nest. The old queen mother is bitten, jostled, and otherwise worried into a state of excitement. Then at once, about half the colony's population, along with the queen mother, takes wing and pours out of the colony's entrance, forming a cloud of bees easily filling a space equal to a suburban back yard."


They leave behind a new queen and the other part of the hive. So you can imagine why we were worried, we thought we had lost some bees.


We had read some information about capturing a swarm, as well as heard swarm-capturing stories in the beekeepers club we belong to. Our favorite story was from a man who used the shot-gun method once. He put a box under the branch, and used his shotgun to shoot down the branch so it fell in the box.


Our ladder was not long enough to get near the branch. So we called our daughter and son-in-law who live about 1/3 mile down the dirt road from us. We told them they could have the bees if they could help get them out of the tree. Our son-in-law always seems to have a tool for a job.







The first ladder he had was not long enough. So they went back to find another one.



While all of this was going on, I checked out our hives to see whether the swarm might be from our hives. It turns out our hives were well-populated and it did not seem they were ours. Later we compared pictures and the swarm bees looked like a different type than ours.


When they came back, our daughter and son-in-law brought a longer ladder, a hacksaw, and a pool net. Colleen set up the hive body directly under the swarm. I switched out one of the empty frames for a frame with uncapped honey from one of our hives. This was to give the swarm something that would be attractive them once we got them out of the tree.


Our son-in-law first tried the cardboard box method. He climbed up the ladder, held the cardboard box under the swarm and jostled them to try to get them into the box. Every step he took up the ladder shook the tree and the branch and the bees kept shifting around in the swarm making it look like a shape-shifting creature as the swarm took on different configurations.







The cardboard box method did not work well. A few hundred bees fell into the box and I dumped them into the hive body. But to get the bees to stay you have to get the queen into it.


He climbed back up the ladder with the hacksaw, and proceeded to saw off the limb. The limb fell on top of the hive body and some of the bees fell into the body as well. However, the queen bee flew back up to another limb in the tree, followed by a spiraling group of bees. It seemed
as if the air was full of bees.







Then he took the pool net, put it under the swarm, shook it, and dumped the bees from the net into the hive body. We all took turns doing that and we eventually got the queen into the hive body. The rest of the bees followed her. It was interesting seeing so many bees (might have been several thousand bees) doing that. Colleen and her daughter were scooping up handfuls of bees and dropping them into the hive body (of course we were all in bee suits with veils and gloves).









The bees quickly calmed down and began their job of settling into their new hive.







A swarm of bees in May

Is worth a load of hay;

A swarm of bees in June

Is worth a silver spoon;

A swarm of bees in July

Is not worth a fly.


Old beekeeper's saying.